WWIIO: Battleground Europe

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Figured we need another of these threads about this unique game. It's been a couple of years since it last came up

The current campaign just ended so now is the time to get a 14 day free trial. There'll be 2 or 3 days of "intermission" which is basically a time for the players to rest and take it easy and try out any weapon or vehicle regardless of your rank. Usually the weapon or vehicle you can use is reliant on your current rank so get in game now to try out all of them before the next campaign starts!

Basically wwiio is a simulation of the entire area of north west europe during the start of the war. It's one big map that covers england, france, germany, belgium, holland and luxembourg and you can fly, drive, walk or sail the entire area at will.

The graphics look quite dated but this is mainly due to the fact that the view distance is so far and the complexity of the simulation. The physics and damage models are by far the most realistic of any game in the world. There are no hitpoints, it's simply a matter of what damage your shot would do in real life.. if it hits armour too thick it will bounce off and do no damage, if the shot penetrates it determines whether it hit a fuel tank, ammo storage or a crew member position. There's nothing else like it out there.

There's also nothing else out there like the teamwork that leads to some of the most tense battles you will ever take part in. No more meaningless 20 minute fights. These battles all mean something and one epic battle can mean the end of the campaign with your side winning or losing.

At first the game is incredibly daunting, you won't be able to find the enemy if you can even find a fight at all. Once you get used to it (and there are players dedicated to training new people) then you'll be able to find an active fight no problem which will throw you right into the thick of things.

This is a game like no other in the world, if for no other reason then that I believe everyone should try it. It's certainly for the more patient player, if you like just blasting away with your arcade style FPS's then the infantry battles with rifle vs rifle at long distances with tactics and trying to outthink your opponent mightn't be for you. If you like the idea of hunting down that infantry you saw in the distance or hunting down a lone tank and blowing him up with your HEAT charge then give it a try.

Screenshots to follow shortly.

 

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Flight of hurri 2 ground support fighter-bombers preparing to take off:

Paras loading up for a drop:

 

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The drop:

Tank column moving in on an attack:

The rest of the pictures are ones I took tonight of the final assault on Britain by Troop Transport. I title this section "Why D-Day would have failed without air support".

Loading:

 

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More loading:

Onboard:

 

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Friendly fly-bys:

Not so friendly fly-by getting what he deserves (after he strafed and killed me on the first troop transport):

The in game map:

 

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Sailing into the sunset on our attack:

oops.. spotted:

Getting strafed:

 

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ABANDON SHIP!:

She was a fine vessel:

Not to worry, rescue is here!

oops...

 

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every time...

These are just a few screenshots of what is a fantastic game that, if you give it the time to get to grips with, will have you addicted to it and enjoying every second unlike some other online mmorpgs I could mention. This is the worlds biggest game. Don't miss out on the chance to take part.

Battleground Europe

 

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Battlefield 1942 anyone???

BF1942:

Single games taking 30min or so.
Map spanning maybe 4x4km.
Maybe 6-8 ground vehicles, 4 or so aircraft??
Arcade style damage system.


WWIIO:

Campaign takes 3 months on average.
Map spanning maybe 2,000x2,000km
Around 30 or more accurately modelled vehicles, 24 or so aircraft and a few ships.
All the above with realistic damage model systems, no more "shoot it 3 times to blow it up". It's all about shooting it in the right spot.


The graphics do turn off new players quite quickly but anyone who thinks graphics makes gameplay needs to try out halflife 1 again

The team is constantly listening to the community and updating game rules and the models and engine. It was originally released in June '01. Within the next year they will be entirely revamping the engine bringing us Unity2 which will allow more detailed terrain, more detailed models and better effects. It's still impossible to expect COD4 style graphics when the map is around 4,000,000 times the size of the standard COD4 map but the graphics in game are constantly improving. The flames and smoke system were redone not long ago to give some very nice fire trails as you can see from the screenshots above.

In my view the biggest let downs graphically are the player models and the terrain. The vehicles are all very well modelled and textured, just look at the tiger tank above. Some of them are just beautiful to see rumbling across the terrain towards you (and your satchel charge).

EDIT: The biggest thing for me with this game is that it has story.. not a premade one but one that the players make. Epic battles will appear out of nowhere.. suddenly a pinch town in the frontline appears and it's everyone to the defence or attack for hours on end. There have been battles for cities that have literally gone on for days with a lot of people logging in 12+ hours in a row to command or just play. This game will drag you in and make you think at times that you're actually fighting the war.

 

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If you just want to check out the size of the map and what's going on in the game along with the complexity of it all then check out:

http://begm.sourceforge.net/

It's a 3rd person tool that keeps and eye on the map and attacks and a bunch of other things. You'll get an idea how the brigade/division system works from seeing the HCs on either side maneuver them around to try and get the best attack/defence positions.

 

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I thought the trees were pretty dates aswell. It seemed impossible to actually locate a machine gunner if he was in the foiliage of a tree. Although, that might make it more realistic? I don't know.

Slightly off topic, but are there any other open world fps multiplayer games?

At a distance the bushes do turn into flat sprites which makes it possible to hide inside them. Generally though if you know what you're doing it's possible to hide in them up close as well. The best way to find people is to look for their muzzle flash against the bushes.

Planetside is the only anyway similiar one I can think of but that doesn't have the scale or complexity of wwiio.

 

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The player base is relatively small as it's quite a niche game. I'd estimate around 10-15K in total. On a good night (friday/sat night) you'd see close to 1,000 on each side. That seems like a small amount until you realise that this means each town has a good chance of having over 300 people fighting in it as there is usually only 3 or 4 big battles going on at any one time.

There's quite a few european players so UK prime time is generally quite active. It get's busiest around 8pm to 2am GMT or thereabouts. Low pop times would be around 5am to midday GMT. A lot of finnish players play axis so they get a quick boost around 7-8am with the "Breakfast Club" as they're called coming in and moving the axis lines forward while allied are still low-pop. Similiarly the majority of americans play allied so we get a good boost in US high pop.

The forums had a problem yesterday where they were offline for a good few hours, it's rare that that happens but it probably reduced the activity quite a bit. If you want some good heated debates then the Off-Topic forum is about 80% redneck right wing americans and 20% liberals so it gets interesting at times

There's Barracks, Hanger, Motor Pool and Harbour forum sections too for the different areas of combat. Barracks is generally quite active, Hanger too, Motor Pool and Harbour are pretty quiet as most tankers just post in Barracks and the navy game isn't really up to much until you get to the channel fighting as you see in my screenshots.

It's certainly worth trying out, just log into the game during the evening and ask if there's anyone around who can show you the ropes. Press F5 to active the help chat and F6 to active side chat and type in a message then hit enter.

 

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New campaign starting tomorrow, probably around 6-7pm GMT. Get your rifles out

 

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I think it's $12. About £5-6. Well worth it. Trust me you'll be putting in many hours into this if you give it a chance

There's a 14 day trial period so give it a go and see what you think after 14 days.

 

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What do you actually play for in game? You mention campaigns, how do they work?

Basically there are two sides, allied and axis. Allied is atm made up of British and French (who get a lot of american equipment later on). There are plans to introduce the Italians, americans, russians etc. Who knows when that will be though.

Right now the campaign map stretches across southeast britain, northern france, benelux countries and west germany. It's all free roaming so if you take a bomber in britain you can fly to dusseldorf and bomb their factories if you want. Let's just say it's huge and you'll never feel like you're in a constricted space

The campaign basically pits the two sides against eachother on a middle starting line, axis are generally given a slight advantage by owning most of the forward bases along the line at the start. Forward bases are basically spawn points for infantry and vehicles close to the oppositions town, there are two between each town, one for each side. If you take down your enemies your one becomes active letting you attack their town.

Anyway the campaign starts with early equipment, Matilda tanks, hurricanes, 110s. As it progresses roughly every 7-10 days a new tier is reached that gives better equipment. Each sides progress through the tiers can be affected by damaging their factories by bombing or sapping raids. Campaigns lately have been around 30-40 days long so you'll reach tier3 which is the last one, this gives you the best shermans and Tiger tanks as well as Spit9s and 109G and 190s.

The campaign ends when either side controls roughly 90% of the maps towns. There are roughly 200 towns on the map and each one is a big fight to take. The amount of Attack Orders (AOs) your side has depends on the current server population. Generally you have between 3 and 5 AOs. These can be placed on a town, once an AO has been placed for 10 minutes you can start capping the flags in the town. These flags are depots that are linked to each of the surrounding towns (usually 4 or 5). Once you have capped a depot the town is contested, if you keep the town contested for 10 minutes the Army Base(AB) of the town can be capped. The AB is the towns main flag, once you get that the enemy brigade(s) in the town are routed to the next town. After that you just have to cap any remaining depots and the town is yours and you can move your own brigades in.

The AO placement and brigade movements are all controlled by members of the High Command(HC) of each side. There are about 40 or so HC members on each side so there'll always be 3 or 4 on even in the low pop times one of whom will be map OIC and he generally dictates the course to take such as concentrate on pushing this area here or attritioning an enemy division here in advance of a big attack later on.

Each side has about 30 brigades split up 3 to a division so about 10 divisions a side. Each division can move anywhere on the map and each brigade can move to any town so long as it's next to another brigade in its division. Sometimes towns will be left defenceless without a brigade in them. The only way to defend these would be if you have a brigade in a linked town you can spawn into the empty towns linked depot or you can paradrop in to defend.

It's pretty hard to explain all the details without showing them in game. Basically at the start you'll be looking for the big battles. These are easy enough to find, you can ask on the chat or just listen out for calls from the HC members or people at the towns requesting help. All you do then is right click on the town and join one of the brigades defending it or if it's an attack you right click on the town the attacking brigade is in and join it then join any of the missions that are up within the brigade.

I think I've rambled on a bit much on it. If you have any other questions just let me know. This game is the best online game I've ever come across, all it needs is a larger playerbase to be phenomenal.

 

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Don't worry too much about the graphics, they're constantly improving them and there is a huge update coming by the end of this year that completely overhauls the game engine to let them use a more accurate terrain model, higher poly models and shader 2.0+ effects.

Just thought I'd mention, the free trial requires you to give them CC details, they won't start charging you though so it's completely safe. They just had a lot of people making free accounts over and over when they weren't using the CC check so they had to do something about it.

The infantry play at close quarters is a bit laggy but tbh if you're at close quarters with a rifle you're doing it wrong

This game truly excels at 50m+ ranges, the lag isn't such an issue, it's all about outsmarting your opponent, getting the kill in those situations is something else again.

Of course if you like CQB there are spray and pray SMGs and LMGs available for dashing through buildings with, running into the flag building and spraying 3 or 4 EI full of bullets before they can react is always quite enjoyable.

Expect some odd lag effects like being shot after you've killed the other person though. The server gets the message that you've shot the other person at the same time as the other person is telling the server he shot you so you both end up dying. Not really avoidable in the situation especially with the enormous amount of packets going to and fro.

I dare any of you to stand in the middle of a large battle, planes roaring overhead, tanks fighting in the next street, your friends running past you towards the advancing enemy and not think to yourselves that this is what gaming is supposed to be about.

 

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Can you play many classes? I'd love to be in charge of firing mortars on an enemy position, is that sort of thing possible?

yep, you start off with rifle just but you quickly rank up to get SMG, sapper (placing satchels on tanks to blow them up), LMG, mortar, sniper etc. You have different ranks in Naval, Air and Ground. So whatever rank you are as infantry is the same as the one for tanks but your rank in a plane is different.

By rank 5 you can get all infantry weapons and tanks.

 

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Sounds fantastic. Can you oick and choose waht you want to be? Could I be a grunt on the front line today but tomorrow take a Lancaster to Berlin?

Yup, can be flying one minute, tanking the next, infantry the next. You can even get destroyers if you have the patience to rank up in the naval side of things

The ballistics are part of what make it a fantastic game. In the words of the developers themselves, nothing in the game has health points. It's all modelled realistically. If you shot doesn't penetrate the armour of a tank you could fire a thousand shells at it and it won't make a difference, aim a bit different though and you'll take out his ammo storage and he'll blow sky high.

EDIT: Go here to download the penultimate infantry guide for wwiio. It is the single best reference for the game if you want to try out the infantry side. It's got everything you'll ever need to know:
http://www.mediafire.com/?wv5yt2gtx1m

 

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Where are the servers hosted and what's the ping like from the UK?

Servers are hosted in the states. Ping is around 150~. Really not that big a deal. As was said above everyone lags pretty badly in CQB. The game excels in mid-long range battles with rifles, LMGs and tanks. There's a large contingent of australian players and they never complain about any unfair lag so I think we've got it good compared to them

 

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So say I wanted to go firebomb Dresden, can I do it alone or does there need to be a player for every position on the plane - Pilot, navigator bombardier etc or can I do it with just me?

Either or, most people do it alone and switch between positions. There is level flying autopilot for when bombing and it remembers the last input of the joystick so if you want to slowly turn in a direction while using the rear MG you can. Multi-crewing is some of the most fun you'll have in game though if you get a good guy on team speak to do it with you.

Both sides have a dedicated TS channel with a HC room and a room for each bde (generally each squad belongs to a particular bde so they hang out in there).

I play most days when time allows. Be careful though as there are days where I'll throw it on in the morning just before breakfast then suddenly it'll be 6pm and my stomach will clench so hard from not having food that I almost fall off the chair =/